"Say It Plain is a vivid, moving portrait of how black Americans have sounded the charge against injustice, exhorting the country to live up to its democratic principles. In "full-throated public oratory, the kind that can stir the soul" (Minneapolis Star Tribune), this unique anthology collects the transcribed speeches of the twentieth century's leading African American cultural, literary, and political figures, many of them never before available in printed form. From an 1895 speech by Booker T. Washington to Julian Bond's harp assessment of school segregation on the fiftieth anniversary of...

Published to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, After the Fall is a landmark oral history drawn from the celebrated collection of 9/11 interviews at Columbia University.
Within days of 9/11, Columbia s Oral History Research Office deployed interviewers across the city to begin collecting the accounts and observations of hundreds of people from a diverse mix of New York neighborhoods and backgrounds. Over subsequent months and years, follow-up interviews produced a deep and revealing look at how the attacks changed individual lives and...

In 1964, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the civil rights movement. He spoke with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.
A year later, Penn Warren would publish Who Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. The...